HISTORY. The harbour of Povlja and Luke on the west were the main anchorages for Roman ships. The remains of amphoras affirm such a hypothesis. Near the Roman estate building on Zalo there are the remains of a water-tank. In the surroundings there are some copper objects and graves which all bear witness to the size of this estate.

We see the row of wooden dwellings on Lokva where a large Early Christian basilica with font used to stand with graves and other, auxillary religious objects, possibly from the 6th century. It was erected upon the site of a former pagan shrine such as are found in the neighborhood Bunje ( Novo Selo) and in Pučišća The size of the Early Christian church and the font give the idea that it was the religious center of a wider region, probably the whole of Eastern Brač and, to some extent also of Podbickovlje, across the channel.

At the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century, Christian history began its course here with the big and famous Benedictine monastery of St. John. Upon the deserted Early Christian church, the Benedictines built a shrine (the Early Christian font) and the gathering place, (above the apse of the former church). The monastery was devastated in 1145 by pirates, but the friars rebuilt it in 1184. It was in the year of the council that was held in the episcopal palace in Bol . On that occasion all the formerly possessed estates were returned to the monastery. By means of various prebends and other acquisitions the friars in Povlja succeeded in gaining one sixth of the most fertile land in the eastern from 1184 was rewritten and verified 66 years later in the famous Register of Povlja which is by its lay-out the oldest register written in the Croatian language. It is kept in the parish office in Pučišća. Of no less importance is the Povlja lintel. It is the lintel of the Benedictine church in which in 1184, the first Croatian master known by name of Radonja engraved, besides his name, a few lines in dodecasyllabic verses following the Greek pattern. These lines are the first verses found with the Croats and belong to the very rare old verses ever written in any of the Slav languages. The lintel is kept in the Museum of Croatian monuments in Split. The monastery was many times attacked and plundered (in 1240, 1294) so that it was finally deserted in the middle of the century. In 1415 the island’s authorities visited the island and decided the boundary lines of the abbey and returned to it its estates. Those boundaries are marked with crosses carved in stone which can still be seen on the bluff near the sea on the Scirova glava (The Scirova cape). In the centuries to come there were constant disputes about the rights of jurisdiction over the abbey. Napoleon’s rule in Dalmatia put a final end to the abbey in 1807 and in the middle of the 19th century the entire estate was sold.

Up to the 16th century the surroundings of the church of Povlja were not populated. Only after the Kandi’s or Cretan war (1645-1669) did the refugees from Bosnia come through Poljica and Krajina and merged with Brač’s old settlers. The consequences of this migration are felt in the Povlja dialect.

The first dwellers settled at a distance of a kilometer and a half from the present settlement where we can still see the ruins and a cemetery. This place is called Gornja Povlja (The Upper Povlja). In the 19th century Povlja reached an economic development that caused the awakening of national consciousness. In 1894 the Tomislav society was founded with a reading room. At that time Povlja had 900 inhabitants. They founded the first Dalmatian oil-community. After the First World War, the number of population records decrease, which was also the case with other settlements on Brač. [P.Simunović]